How to Launch a New Site in the New Year

Creating a website is one of the most common ways to make money and to establish an online presence.

posted on 17th January 2018

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Creating a website is one of the most common ways to make money and to establish an online presence. But, with thousands of websites being launched every day, it can become difficult to make an impact on your website launch date. That is the reason why you need to carefully plan what your website should be and how you should create it. In this article, we will help you with that by providing the top seven most important steps you should do before launching a new website. Check them out.

Define goals or targets

Developing a website launch plan is not compulsory for all site launches, but it is necessary if you want to create a purposeful online venture. Your website’s launch plan should primarily include all the goals and targets that you want your site to reach within the next few months or years. Also, remember that creating a list of goals and site targets should be done before your new site is officially launched. This list should also be routinely updated as your new site grows.

Create a unique website branding identity

After setting up website targets, the next step is to decide on your website brandingidentity. A website’s brand is its image. It is how you want your website to be perceived by its visitors and readers. Therefore, you should choose a unique and easily recognizable branding identity. For websites, branding identity will depend on many things like the type of website you are launching, the industry you are in, the type of customers you wish to attract, etc. You can easily do this by first choosing a brandable domain name and an equally compelling logo design.

Choose a good website design

Another important step in building a website is choosing a website design. These days, anyone can use pre-made premium and free website themes or hire professional graphic designers to create an original website design. But note that if you want your website to have as much impact as possible, you need to intelligently meld a good website design with your business’ unique branding identity.

Install website analytics

Before officially launching a website, you should never forget to install website analytics and trackers. This allows you to quantitatively measure and determine the significance of different data gathered from your site. You may then use this data to help improve user experience on your website. There are a lot of free website analytics tools available online today and some of them are even offered by Google and Bing. But, if you prefer to get more in-depth diagnostics for your website, you may sign up for tools like Ahrefs and SEOMoz.

Start an email list

An email list is a collection of people’s email addresses gathered during the period before your website is launched. It is an important component of any website launch because you will ideally have to send an introductory email on the day of or before your website launch. This strategy makes sure that your website gets a substantial amount of traffic on your launch date. An email list will then be used for email marketing as your website grows. If you do not yet have one, you can start your own email list by creating a Coming Soon page on your domain URL. This means that nothing is posted on your website except for a splash page that asks visitors to enter their email address with the promise of more content in the next few days or weeks to come.

For those who have never created a website, you may need to first learn how to use email automation tools like Aweber and MailChimp. These tools allow you to organize and monitor the email that you send to anyone on your list while also keeping track if they have opened and read your email or not. There also are free email automation tools available today and you can use them if you are still not yet comfortable with using the premium versions.

Sign up for different social media accounts

Social media marketing is another business strategy that you can employ for your website once it is launched. But, while you are still preparing for this launch, it pays to start signing up for different social media networks. The key rule is that you should create a social media account depending on the type of customers or market your website targets.

For example, if you are launching an online crafting supply store, it is best to open a Facebook page, a Pinterest page, and an Instagram account. These social media sites will allow you to post product photos that customers can click on if they are interested in buying such items. By creating various social media accounts before your website is officially launched, you can plan what type of content to post on them, too. In addition, you may use matching website logo images and profile page designs on all your social media accounts to help increase your brand’s recognizability.

Create high-quality content

Perhaps the most important aspect of pre-launch planning for a website is content creation. Remember that with Google officially using Rankbrain in their search algorithm, backlinks and other factors have been given lesser emphasis when it comes to choosing sites for a search results page. Evergreen content is now more important than ever. But, what does this mean for anyone who wishes to start a website in the new year? It simply means that if you focus on creating content that has a timeless appeal, your readers will find it useful, refer back to it, and naturally share it with others. If done right, you may not even have to engage in other website-building tasks that can take up a lot of your time.

The different steps outlined above are the most important ones to do before the official launch of any website this year. If you want your site to succeed and rank high on search results, it definitely pays to religiously and intelligently apply the different tips shared here. And, if you found the lessons on this article useful, do not hesitate to share them with your friends and colleagues so that they too will experience website success.

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